Counter Strike: Global Offensive, PUBG Battlegrounds, Hogwarts Legacy, GTA 5 and the Dark and Darker demo have one thing in common: All games were in the top 10 list of the most played games on Steam last week. There are long-running favorites like CS: GO and PUBG, current games like Hogwarts Legacy, but also occasionally popular indies like Dark and Darker. Next Fest ran on Steam from February 7th to 13th, where demos of numerous upcoming games could be tried out.
Included were Voidtrain, Darkest Dungeon 2, Boundary, Planet of Lana and Dark and Darker. The PvPvE dungeon crawler has apparently hit the nerve of many fantasy fans, because at peak times over 100,000 players strolled through the gloomy walls and caves at the same time. The hype behind it is relatively easy to explain, after all the game uses popular features from other genres, throws them into a big pot and stirs them vigorously. The ingredients harmonize surprisingly well with each other, but the rounds do not yet work optimally.
Extraction, Zone and Skeletons
First the game principle: At the beginning we choose our character from six roles. Each role has particular strengths and weaknesses as well as its own level system. So if we’re playing a warrior, we’re going to rank up that character.
Barbarians, Mages, Archers, Rogues and Clerics then have no experience points. If you don’t feel like male characters, you can simply select the same roles as women at the push of a button.
After a short loading screen and a relatively superfluous lobby in which we at least marvel at a cute dog named Otto, we find ourselves in a dark corner. The goal is the center of the map, which we’ll fight our way to while taking as much loot as possible. Because only in the center do we have the opportunity to leave the map alive again. It is played from the first-person perspective.
To help, we see a white circle on the minimap that gets smaller as the round progresses. In the last area, tombstones will spawn from a certain point in time, which we can convert into portals and thus escape from the dungeon.
If you die, you lose – everything you’ve collected so far. This happens very quickly, because even with strong armor we can only withstand a few hits. In contrast to the NPCs – they take a lot of hits, stabs and arrows.
Dark and Darker Review: Why is the fantasy game demo so popular? (4)
Source: Ironmace
Whether skeleton, mummy, magical creature or mimic, the computer-controlled figures are a bit too resilient in our opinion. If we spawn poorly equipped in a room full of enemies, we already know we’re in for a short and fruitless round. This quickly becomes frustrating, especially for newcomers.
It took us at least 15 attempts before our first extraction. Dark and Darker is rock hard, after all, human enemies sometimes surprise us from ambush and club us down with ice cold. The developers should definitely adjust at least the balancing of the spawn points, because they are sometimes set very unfairly.
